by Un-su Kim
‘Lie low for a few days,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything.’ That meant Reseng was excused.
‘Hanja looked pretty angry.’
Old Raccoon let out a short laugh. ‘What’s he got to be angry about? He got what he wanted.’
Reseng tilted his head quizzically. ‘But he was carrying on about us blowing a plot worth billions of won…’
‘You really think he’d trust us with something that big? He’s thrilled because now he has a reason to run around telling those old government geezers The Doghouse messed up. Ha! I swear, he’s too clever.’
Old Raccoon seemed amused. But what on earth was there to laugh about?
‘Is the library closing?’ Reseng asked.
Old Raccoon looked confused.
‘Hanja tried to scare me by saying the library is closing.’
Old Raccoon thought about it for a moment. A strange smile came over his face.
‘If it closes, it closes,’ he said flatly. ‘What’s there to be afraid of? Not like there was ever any glory in this library anyway.’
But how could that be? How could he close the library that he’d personally overseen for the last sixty years? Old Raccoon’s voice was calm and blunt, as if he’d been readying himself for this moment for a long, long time. Perhaps that was why he sounded so determined as well.
Everyone said that Old Raccoon was born in the library and had lived there his whole life. It wasn’t a metaphor. He actually was born in it. He was the son of the handyman who’d lived in a cottage attached to the library and had kept the roof, electricity and plumbing in working order. After the bout of polio that left him with a permanent limp, Old Raccoon went to work keeping the library clean when he was only six years old. At the age of fifteen, he became a librarian, and at the tender age of twenty-one he became head librarian. It wasn’t clear how Old Raccoon, who was not only disabled but hadn’t even finished elementary school, was able to beat out the colonial officials who’d graduated from Keijo Imperial University in Seoul or studied abroad in Japan, to become first head librarian and then later director of the library. Perhaps the library was far too quiet and boring a place for smart people to devote their whole lives to. Or perhaps it was just too dangerous.
Old Raccoon was studying the urn closely. After a moment, he seemed to realise Reseng was looking at him and turned his gaze back to the encyclopedia, but it was obvious he wasn’t actually reading. He’d forgotten to put his reading glasses back on. As Old Raccoon stared blindly at the page, he suddenly looked much older.
‘I’ll get going,’ Reseng said.
Old Raccoon glanced up and nodded.
When Reseng came out of the study, the cross-eyed librarian was gone. He assumed she’d left to eat lunch. He sat down in her chair. To one side of the desk were her knitting needles and a skein of red wool. A partition concealed a collection of ten or so bottles of nail polish organised by colour, a dainty mini-vanity and a make-up bag that looked like the sort of thing professional make-up artists would take with them to a movie set. Next to it was a set of plastic drawers containing office supplies; each drawer had a nametag stuck to it: Paper Clips, Stapler, X-acto Knife, Scissors, Ruler. Reseng opened the drawer labelled Paper Clips and, sure enough, it contained paper clips. Perched all around the woman’s desk were soft toys: Mickey Mouse, Winnie-the-Pooh, a panda, a maneki-neko and a whole lot more. They looked like they’d always been there and were exactly where they were supposed to be. Reseng poked Winnie-the-Pooh, who was wearing a red T-shirt and no underwear, his belly sticking out, and grinning like an idiot.
The library no longer took in new books. Two years earlier, around the time Bear cremated Chu, Old Raccoon had stopped buying any and had even cancelled his regular orders. Strictly speaking, the library no longer needed a librarian. All it needed was a secretary, or a caretaker. Someone to answer the phone, take out the garbage and occasionally wipe away the dust.
Reseng stood and walked slowly down the rows under the watchful eyes of the old books that hadn’t been opened in decades and were so dry that a single match could have set them off like gunpowder. He trailed his fingers along their spines, feeling like he’d returned to a laneway he had skipped down as a child.
He stopped and pulled out a book. The Origin of Everything. He examined the front and back covers and flipped through the pages. He wasn’t actually trying to read it, though he would have back in the old days; he had no interest in the book, nor was there anything in it he hoped to find. He simply flipped through it out of habit. The first line read: ‘The first vegetable ever eaten by human beings was the onion.’ It wasn’t deep, and it wasn’t didactic. It simply meant what it said. Listed in the book were other sentences: ‘The inventor of the reclining chair was Benjamin Franklin.’ And: ‘The first tool ever used was a hammer.’ Reseng chuckled. Old Raccoon would love this book.
Reseng reshelved the book and looked around at the library. The old wooden shelves glowed in the sunlight filtering down through the slatted windows on the second floor. A library in decline. Its good old days long behind it. Maybe, just as Hanja had said, it was time to close. Everything in it was far too old to handle the changes that had come to the assassination market. The days of youthful recklessness were over. The days of taking on difficult, dangerous assignments without a word of complaint and carrying them off flawlessly. The days when contractors had come from all over in search of Old Raccoon, when the high-paying gigs never stopped coming, when their pockets overflowed with cash. The days when even government officials had to watch themselves around Old Raccoon, and the entire meat market had moved like clockwork at a single word from him. Those days were well and truly over. Just as it got no new books, the big jobs no longer fell to the library.
From the start, Old Raccoon should have been preparing for the day he’d end up an over-the-hill has-been. He should have partnered with a powerful company, or, if that wasn’t to his liking, he should have struck a deal with Hanja and handed over his client list. Unless his retirement plan was to get knifed by a bunch of scumbags while limping down a dark lane one night and meet his tragic end as a corpse fished out of the sewer, he should have at least put some money away. Or given some thought to preparing a safe house like others did in some place like Switzerland or Alaska. But instead Old Raccoon sat in his crumbling library reading encyclopedias. All he had left were those old books, so old that even a garbage collector would have turned up his nose at them.
Now Old Raccoon’s life hung in the balance of Hanja’s arithmetic. The only reason he’d survived that long was because Hanja thought there was still some blood to be squeezed out of him. The instant Old Raccoon came up zero in Hanja’s calculations, he was dead. Reseng pushed in a book that was sticking out and wondered how he fared in Hanja’s equations.
‘When the library closes, will my life close too?’ He laughed and raised an eyebrow.
He went up to the second floor and checked the corner near the western wall. The tiny desk and chair where he’d read as a child were still there. Since he hadn’t gone to school, The Doghouse had been his only education, and, in the absence of any friends, it had been his only playground as well. He’d spent most of his childhood playing among the shelves or sitting at that tiny desk reading books.
Looking back on it now, Reseng’s childhood had been nothing but tedium and apathy. He never received so much as a crumb of the adult kindness that was showered on most kids. The bulk of his childhood memories were of the maze of old shelves, the books, the dust, and of Old Raccoon reading day in and day out, his face blank. The librarians he worked so hard to befriend soon left for other places, and the only other people who dropped by—assassins, trackers hunting down targets, and crafty information traders—all looked gruff and never spoke to him. Of those people, some were still alive, some were long dead, and some were so taciturn and expressionless that he couldn’t tell from looking at them whether they were alive or dead.
Old Raccoon had not said anothe
r word about Reseng’s reading habit after slapping him on his ninth birthday. He did not tell him what to read, nor did he tell him what not to read. He was as uninterested in Reseng as he was in his own life. The library remained empty. And somewhere in that empty library was Reseng’s childhood, which had been of no interest to anyone, right along with the books that were no different from a cactus on a shelf or an ornamental stone.
Reseng read purely out of boredom. He didn’t read because he liked books; he read because he had to, because otherwise he would get too bored, or too lonely. After figuring out the alphabet on his own at the age of nine, he had stayed in the library until he was seventeen. Growing up in a library meant having no choice but to read. At seventeen, he made his first kill and used the money he earned to move into a small place of his own. His wages for killing a man went towards an electric rice cooker, rice bowls, a table and silverware. He cooked his own rice for the first time in his new cooker.
Reseng looked down from underneath the second-floor window, where the noon sunshine was spilling in. The librarian had still not returned from lunch, and Old Raccoon’s door was still shut. Reseng looked at the bookshelves to the east, the north, the south and the west in turn. The banks of sleeping books were as still and silent as a fog-covered sea at night. All at once he found it hard to believe that this quiet place had headquartered a den of assassins for the last ninety years. He marvelled at the thought that all those deaths, all those assassinations and unexplained disappearances and faked accidents and imprisonments and kidnappings, had been decided and plotted right here in this building. Who’d chosen this place from which to orchestrate such abominable acts? It was madness. It would have made more sense to set up camp in the office of the National Dry Cleaners Union, or the office of the Organising Committee to Revitalise Poultry Farming. Why pick a library? Libraries were quiet, book-filled places. What had they ever done to hurt anyone?
BEER WEEK
Reseng cracked open a can of beer.
Seven-thirty in the morning. The laneways lined with four-storey, red-brick apartment blocks were jammed with people heading off to work. Reseng opened his window and lit a cigarette. The weather was strange. Weak rays of sunlight filtered down from one side of the sky, while a light rain fell from the other. Actually, the rain wasn’t so much falling as flying around. The morning commuters in ironed suits scowled up at the sky, unsure whether to open their umbrellas. Reseng took another gulp of beer in honour of those who had to go to work in weather this strange.
You might not think of beer as a breakfast drink, but in fact it’s perfect. If knocking back a can of beer after a hard day’s work makes you feel refreshed, rewarded and relaxed, then a can of beer in the morning is about feeling melancholic, fuzzy-headed, improper, and refusing to act like a responsible adult just because the sun’s come up. Reseng loved the feeling of irresponsibility that came with drinking beer for breakfast. The same irresponsibility that turned his sarcasm inward as he gazed out his window and thought, ‘Look at all of you, living life to the fullest. As for my life, to hell with it!’
Reseng took another swig. Guzzling beer while watching people go to work filled his head with surreal images. He pictured himself lying dead in a coffin and debating what to eat for dinner. Dead in a coffin, but his stomach growling as loudly as ever. How could this be? How on earth could a corpse be hungry? Dead Reseng was starving, but no one brought him any food. The funeral guests were all talking about him. ‘He really was a piece of shit, wasn’t he?’ ‘Yup, a complete arsehole.’ It didn’t stop. ‘I know it’s not right to say this in front of the deceased, but honestly he was such a prick. To hear a kid his age talking down to people so much older than him! And he never even thanked me for anything I did for him.’ It was Bear’s voice. Reseng wished he could punch Bear in the back of the head for talking shit about him, but he couldn’t. He was a corpse.
Reseng finished his cigarette, lit up another and swallowed an aspirin with a mouthful of beer. Aspirin, cigarette, beer. The inside of his head was heavy and hazy, like an enormous bank of fog had rolled in. At least once a year, anxiety would swoop down on him for no reason, and his mood would crash. Whenever that happened, Reseng started his mornings with a can of beer. He stayed indoors, turned on some music, curled up on the windowsill like a snail and drank beer all day.
Reseng drained the can and crumpled it, then tossed it onto his desk next to the other two he’d finished. Sitting beside the crumpled cans was the bomb he’d found inside his toilet. Reseng picked it up. It was smaller than a box of matches, so dainty that it had filled him with relief, of the what-harm-could-this-little-thing-do variety. But the guy who ran the meat-market hardware shop had taken one look at it and set him straight.
‘Where’d you say the bomb was?’
‘In my toilet.’
‘This would’ve blown your arse off.’
‘That tiny thing?’
‘The pressure is higher inside a toilet bowl. It’s like squeezing a firecracker in your hand when it goes off. Basically, when you sit down to take a shit, your arse forms a seal over the hole, creating the perfect conditions for this bomb to do maximum damage.’
‘Are you saying it could have killed me?’
‘Ever seen anyone survive without an arse?’
‘So it wasn’t just a threat or a warning.’
‘Not if it had gone off. But it’s hard to say if it would have. I’ve never seen one of these before. It’s waterproofed really well and has a unique chemical fuse that can sense when you take a shit. The amount of explosives is perfectly calculated to take your arse off. But it might have been a dud. Hard to say. Though I can tell it was made by an amateur, because pros don’t make the wiring this complicated. There’s no point.’
The guy held the bomb up to the light to examine it again.
‘It’s really ingenious!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who would make a bomb this cute? None of the guys I know are this creative. I’d love to meet this person.’
Reseng scowled. He’d run errands for this shop since he was twelve, which meant he’d known the owner for twenty years. And yet the guy didn’t so much as blink an eye at the thought of Reseng dead with his arse blown off, or at the tragic fact that Reseng might be on a plotter’s list. To him, Reseng was no different from his countless other regulars who’d ended up neutralised.
‘Anyway, I assume this isn’t the work of the government?’ Reseng asked.
‘Hard to say. Nowadays there are so many hired guns, companies and plotters that no one can keep track. What’d you do?’
‘I can’t count the reasons I should be dead by now. I’ve been in this business for fifteen years, after all.’ Reseng held out his hand, meaning shut up and give it back already.
‘Well, looks like you survived this one,’ the guy said, handing back the deactivated bomb.
‘Hooray for constipation.’
He’d found the toilet bomb about a week ago. When he stepped into his apartment, the smell was different. His cats, who normally raced straight for the door, had hung back. It was obvious someone had been inside. Reseng stood still for a moment to memorise the unfamiliar smell lingering in the air. Was that perfume? Cosmetics? Could it be body odour? But the smell was so faint he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. At any rate, an intruder who left a smell behind had to be an amateur. Pros never left a smell.
Reseng cautiously opened the shoe cabinet, took out a canister of forensic powder and sprayed it on the floor in front of the door. An unfamiliar shoe print appeared. A sneaker, about 250 millimetres in length. It belonged to either a woman or a very short man. There were no prints on the living room floor. The intruder had politely removed his or her shoes at the front door before entering.
‘How thoughtful,’ he muttered.
Reseng stepped into the living room and slowly looked around. If someone had been there, things would be either missing or misplaced. At first glance nothing looked any different. But then he noticed that th
e books stacked on his desk were in reverse order. Chu’s knife, which was always on the third shelf from the bottom, had descended to the second shelf, and the cat toy shaped like a fishing rod that he kept in the mail organiser was lying on the table. In the kitchen, a coffee cup was still wet and the tea towel was damp. Reseng picked up the coffee cup, sniffed it and held it up to the light. He snorted, dumbfounded. What had this person been up to?
The intruder had examined the books in Reseng’s reading stack one at a time, starting from the top. What kind of intruder had that much time on their hands? Why go to the trouble of sneaking in just to find out what he was reading? It made no sense. Not only that, but the intruder had handled a surprising number of his belongings for no apparent reason. Considering that even the cat toy had been taken out, the intruder must’ve tried to play with his cats, then gone into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee and washed the cup. What kind of crazy person does that?
Reseng had been gone no more than two hours. At two p.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he was at the swimming pool. He rarely skipped a workout. The intruder probably made sure he was at the pool before breaking and entering. They knew his exact movements. A plotter was behind this: the first thing plotters did was study their target’s movements. After Reseng left that day, the intruder had spent a leisurely two hours inside his home. He or she had left traces of their presence, not because they were an amateur, but because they just didn’t care. It was a message to Reseng: ‘Think long and hard about why I was here.’
Reseng stood in the middle of the living room. It took him a moment—it wasn’t an easy decision—but once he’d made up his mind, he turned on every light in the place and began ransacking the apartment. He inspected every inch of the wallpaper for tears or knife marks, then did the same for the ceilings and floors. He checked the inside of the stove, the gas lines, the cabinet under the sink, and the insides of the refrigerator and freezer. He upended every drawer, opened every box and searched the inside of the wardrobe, behind the bookshelf, inside the shoe cabinet and light fixtures, behind the wall clock and every corner of the cupboards. Then he examined the bed, the washing machine, the window frames, the curtains. Nothing.